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What About Child Avatars; Where is the Brick?

The Gorean Compass is a class given every Thursday by Master Gorm Runo. Classes are held at the Gorean Campus and are given at noon and 6pm SLT. All are encouraged to come and join in the amazing discussions. This class was held on February 28, 2019.

Tal and greetings,

The old movie “The Ten Commandments” had a scene at the beginning that I have always enjoyed watching. Moses has been sent to supervise the construction of a new city and has been more sympathetic to the Hebrew slaves doing the work. The Pharaoh comes to investigate, and they set up a small scale. As each accusation is made against the kindness of Moses, a smirking Yul Bryner adds a small weight to the scale. It is a very rudimentary “pro and con” list, and the scale drops as the weights are added. When it is time for Moses to respond, he places a finished brick on the scale, which causes the other weights to go flying, and then he pulls open the curtain to reveal the new city taking shape.

I like this scene because it taught me, at an early age, to look for that brick. In many debates and discussions, there is a brick. It will be such an important consideration that it so outweighs all the other issues that it decisively tips the scale and sends all other lesser considerations flying.

In the past week, since my return from vacation, I have been engaged with a rather controversial issue involving child avatars in Gorean role play sims. As I have sought and listened to the opinions of trusted friends and fellow Goreans on this issue, I have been looking for that brick.

When we reviewed the history of role play in Gor, we saw that there had been a movement away from high adventure role play toward a more mundane re-creation of day to day life in a Gorean world. It was suggested that this was actually the exact kind of role play for which Second Life was ideally suited. Pure lifestyle Goreans, who claimed they did not “role play” at all were going to be happier in pure chat room venues, and role play Goreans who loved battles and constant competition and challenge would have been much happier in some X-box type gaming system.

But, the user created platform of Second Life was ideal for “lifestyle of Goreans” type role play, and there is no argument that the day to day life of a Gorean living on that distant planet would involve family and it would involve children.

However, the novels themselves, while very rich in detail to aid in the re-creation and role playing of daily life, were no help in the area of child rearing and early child education. It was as if John Norman had no interest in delving into this area and kept his focus on the more adult issues. It created a rather adult and lopsided view of his fictional world, and, perhaps, that was not an oversight, but intentional.

We have talked about a goal of our Gorean interaction. We suggest it gives us the opportunity to explore alternatives to the insanity of modern Earth society. This is the counter earth idea, that Gor does some things right, that Earth is doing wrong. Of course, in this seminar, I have always argued that we need to be aware that Gor does some things wrong that Earth still manages to get right, also.

However, to apply this method, we need to know what Gor actually does.

There is no question in my mind that the parenting and raising of children is a serious concern in Earth society, and might easily fall into the “Earth sucks” column. We constantly hear talk about how children have lost all concept of responsibility, respect, and discipline. Many people believe our educational system exists to indoctrinate rather than educate our children. All and all, many older people despair for the future when they view the antics of the young.

Although I am fairly certain that every older generation has always felt that way about the young, most likely all the way back to caveman days, I will admit the problem on Earth seems to be a serious one.

So, why not explore alternative parenting skills and methods of educate in our role play re-creation of Gorean daily life? It seems that there are some valid reasons and concerns for avoiding doing this type of role play. Here are a few of them, like little weights being added to the scale.

Since there is one thing we all agree on, and that is that real children should not be involved, we really have to get into “pretending we are something we are not.” We have spoken often of the idea of “pretending” when discussing other issues, such as the use of alts and gender bending in the role play. We would suggest that when a man creates a female avatar to try to experience what it might be like to be a female slave, for example, all he experiences is what it might be like to be a man pretending to be a female. He learns very little of how a female actually feels or might respond.

So, pretending to be a child gives us no real insight into how an actual child might feel or respond.

The issue of child abuse is a serious and emotionally charged issue. It is a major problem in Earth society. There are some that argue that it has always existed and has always been as bad as today, but we talk about it more now. I don’t think that is true at all. Sure, it has always existed, but I think it is a worse problem now, and for many of the same reasons that have led some of us to seek out Gorean role play in the first place.

Sexual abuse of the young is rarely about sex. It is more about power and control. Men, who feel powerless and out of control with females their own age, are often the ones driven to seek younger and younger companions just to restore a normal sense of control.

Since the Master/slave dynamic, or even the Male dominance dynamic is often addressing similar kinds of issues in a major Counter Earth manner, it does seem to be a good idea to avoid any perception of actual wrong doing, or even the perception of lending philosophical support to it.

I can relate a personal experience to this idea of perception. My brother, in rl, had no idea of this “Gor thing.” He was aware, however, of a visit by a German girl, who was my “slave girl” to Las Vegas, and as it was her vacation, she brought her fourteen year old daughter with her.

Although the presence of the young girl definitely impacted the visit, everyone involved was a responsible adult, and the girl was exposed to nothing that would be considered even remotely inappropriate. A year or so after this visit, my brother got his first look at SL Gor, and saw a typical tavern scene. His reaction was immediate and severe. He made a connection between the young girl’s visit and what he saw portrayed in pixelated form on his computer and became quite upset and convinced that we were all going to end up in jail.

I can only imagine his reaction if he had seen child avatars playing outside the tavern.

We want to think our world here represents a higher standard. We want to believe that Gorean’s would be so honorable and so moral that they would be staunch protectors of children and not their abusers. We want very badly to see ourselves as the strong and confident ones that would never be drawn into that kind of personal weakness and shame.

It took me a long time to convince my own brother of our higher standards, and our sense of age appropriateness, however, and so I despair at the idea of trying to convince strangers of our motives when the door seems open to activities that, to use the words of several people at last night’s discussion in Ar on this very topic, seem very creepy and make them uncomfortable even when they acknowledge that no actual wrong doing is taking place.

We have issues, adult issues, galore to explore in our role play here. The complex dynamics of male/female interaction is one example. We need to learn how to do a better job in understanding how Men need to react and communicate with each other. We need to deal with the issues of jealousy and envy in our personal relationships. We need to work on personal responsibility and a myriad of other things that are going wrong on Earth and can be improved by taking a Counter Earth approach.

Many of the things common in our SL Gorean world, such as female slavery, or even the violence of the Gorean world, create public relations nightmares for us with most mainstream non-Goreans. We are certainly not the poster children of a “woke” society, and that negative perception is a major problem for many of us who are already forced to hide our Gorean leanings from our families and make sure it is not known in our work place environments.

Why would we take on an issue that we can not really explore without making a great leap into pretending? Why would we, when we have so many other perception problems with the outside community, deliberately introduce something that can easily give a distorted and even more serious perception of wrong doing?

Where is that “brick” that would make this all a slam dunk issue? I do not think it exists, and so the scale simply moves back and forth as the various arguments are presented and people view this issue from their own positions and based on their own personal prejudice.

And we need a brick to justify this type of role play. There are too many weights piled up on the other side of the scale. It is already too tilted to the side of caution, and the feelings are running too hot and intense. If there is one single all consuming argument to justify it, like Moses’ finished brick, to tilt the balance, I am unable to find it.

Without that absolute argument, I have to conclude that this is an area best avoided. Of course, we are Goreans, and as such mostly concerned with making rules for ourselves and for those that look to us for leadership, and not for everyone. So, I will take a stand that child avatars should not be allowed on my Gorean sim, nor will I , in anyway support, child based roleplay. I hope that by doing my weekly radio show this week on the topic, and making it the discussion topic at Ar last night, and doing this class on it, sets an example. It should show that Goreans are not close minded, and unlike the people down there on Earth, are willing to tackle the serious issues head on, and can respect and entertain disagreement without anger or without running away and hiding.